Hi Wouter, On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 12:18:00PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > I don't think it is. All packages that do things at early boot have > complicatd requirements; nbd isn't the only one. It's just the first one > you hear about.
Thank you for not giving up here. > > and that debvm may not be the right hammer for your job? While debvm > > gives you a complete rootfs, you seem to be satisfied with a kernel an > > an initrd. > > No, that is not accurate; I do need a root filesystem too. Now that - to me - is a compelling argument. Arguably, that should have been obvious. Thanks for spelling it out. > Yes, I could run debvm-create and then do the extraction of the kernel > and initrd myself, but that shouldn't be necessary -- debvm-run would be > a perfectly good abstraction, if only it allowed me to tell it not to > try to mount the hard drive automatically and/or let me override the > root= parameter. I believe I now understand your use case and I follow your reasoning that debvm could reasonably do better at supporting it. Both mmdebstrap and debvm-create have a --skip mechanism. Doing something similar to debvm-run seems sensible initially. The precise way of doing it less so. Would you be interested in helping sort the details? For one thing, I think your use of -append does not work well with debvm-run. While it sounds like it was appending, it actually is replacing the kernel cmdline. debvm-run has its own ideas and passes the rootfs, console and terminal emulation type there. By overriding -append, you miss all of that. I suspect, we need a more clever management of cmdline here and am unsure what that should be exactly. For passing the actual rootfs, I guess a --skip=rootdev would address your need. I imagine it as skipping both the root= cmdline argument and passing of the blockdev. Other things that users might want to skip include the network setup (not in your case ;) and the random device setup. So at this point, the addition of a --skip option seems fairly likely to me, but I'd like to consult with other users some more and won't upload debvm before bookworm has been released anyway. Still your (and other's) input on what kind of features should be skippable and how we could better deal with the cmdline is welcome. Thanks for insisting. Helmut
